(New York, NY, October 3, 2016) Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by acclaimed Spanish artist Miquel Barceló. This is the artist’s second exhibition at the gallery, and will feature two new series of paintings and a selection of new ceramic works. The exhibition is on view from October 27 to December 9, 2016 at 18 East 79th Street, New York City.

In his paintings, Barceló returns to two subjects that have continued to inspire the Mallorcan artist throughout his career––his love of the sea and the spirit of the bullfight. His intensely-colored seascapes and corrida paintings apply meticulous layers of mixed media to realize heavily impastoed canvases, while his ceramics evoke organic forms.

One of the most celebrated artists in Europe, Barceló’s work has been regularly commissioned for notable public spaces including Gran Elefandret, installed in New York’s Union Square in 2011, a ceramic panorama for the chapel of St. Pere in the Cathedral of Palma, and Room XX in The United Nations Headquarters in Geneva in 2008, in which the artist covered the immense domed ceiling with stalactites made from 35 tons of paint. Last summer, he was the subject of joint exhibitions in Paris, held at the Musée Picasso and the Bibliothčque Nationale de France.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by art historian Catherine Lampert.

Miquel Barceló was born in Felanitx, Majorca in 1957 and currently lives and works in Mallorca, Spain, and Paris, France. The youngest artist to ever show at the Musée du Louvre, Barceló represented Spain at the 53rd Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta VII in Kassel, Germany. He has had retrospectives at renowned institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico; the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; and is included in many esteemed public and private collections worldwide.

New York, August 16, 2016—Renowned for her innovative images documenting Mexico City’s urban expansion and vibrant cultural scene, Kati Horna (Budapest, 1912 – Mexico City, 2000) was already a widely published photographer of the Spanish Civil War when she arrived in Mexico at the end of 1939. Her prolific career will be the focus of the exhibition Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press on view at the Americas Society Art Gallery from September 13 to December 17, 2016. Curated by Michel Otayek and Christina L. De León, the exhibition is the first solo show in the United States to examine Horna’s influential collaboration with the illustrated press. Featuring Horna’s photographs displayed alongside the newspapers and magazines that put them in circulation, the exhibition will comprise some never-before-seen materials including contact sheets, montage cuttings, and personal albums. A press preview and reception will be held at the Americas Society Art Gallery in New York City on Tuesday, September 13, at 5:00 p.m. R.S.V.P.: mediarelations@as-coa.org.

Born in Budapest to a wealthy Jewish family, Horna (née Katalin Deutsch Blau) settled in Berlin in the early 1930s and became part of a group of activists, artists, and intellectuals close to the dissident Marxist theoretician Karl Korsch and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht. At a time in which photojournalism was emerging as a phenomenon of mass culture, Horna was able to seize upon the field’s opportunities for professional, aesthetic, and political engagement. In 1933, forced to flee Germany due to the rise of National Socialism, she briefly returned to Budapest where she studied photography with József Pécsi. She then moved to Paris, living there until she left for Barcelona a few months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the military uprising against the Spanish Republican government, the exhibition explores Horna’s work as a photographer and photomonteur engaged in the construction of a forceful anarchist narrative. At age 24 she became one of the few women to photograph the frontlines of war. Her images appeared in a wide range of propaganda materials including brochures, newspapers, and wide-circulation magazines like Umbral, an anarchist weekly where she held the position of lead photographer and graphic director.

“This exhibition demonstrates that in order to grasp some of the subtleties and complexities of Horna’s mature work in Mexico it is crucial to consider the depth of her intellectual upbringing, the extent of her political radicalization as a young artist, and the true nature of her involvement with the anarchist fringe of the Spanish Civil War,” says curator Christina De León.

In 1939, following the war’s end, Horna and her husband—Spanish artist José Horna—settled in Mexico City, where she began collaborating with the country’s illustrated press. Registering the city’s rapid transformation and cultural landscape in the mid-twentieth century, Horna’s photos appeared on the pages of magazines such as Nosotros, Arquitectura México, and Mujeres: Expresión Femenina. In Mexico, she was active in several artistic and intellectual circles. This included her friendships with Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as well as her association with Mathias Goeritz, a seldom-recognized connection that proved to be one of the most fruitful partnerships of her career.

“Horna conceived much of her work as series for the illustrated press, some of them with a powerful narrative impulse,” says curator Michel Otayek. “We want to invite viewers to consider the circulation of Horna’s images in a wide range of print materials and get a sense of her intellectual sophistication, understated sense of humor, and fondness for collaborative work.”

In the 1960s, Horna produced a remarkable body of deeply personal work, some of it as photo stories for magazines such as the avant-garde publication S.nob. Related to issues of gender, transience, and desire, these stories testify to Horna’s creative flourishing as a mature artist in exile. Parallel to these projects, Horna also undertook numerous assignments of architectural photography during this period. Her arresting formalist photographs of landmark modern Mexican architecture as in Ricardo Legorreta’s Automex factory in Toluca reflect Horna’s interest in pure form, a time she later remembered as the creative pinnacle of her life. In later years, Horna concentrated on her work as a teacher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Universidad Iberoamericana, serving as a mentor to numerous young photographers, including Flor Garduńo, Víctor Monroy, Estanislao Ortíz, and Sergio Carlos Rey.

Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press is presented by Americas Society in collaboration with Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, S.C.

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of PHILLIPS, lead sponsor of Americas Society’s Visual Arts Program, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Additional support is provided by Genomma Lab Internacional, Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, the Smart Family Foundation, the Consulate General of Spain in New York, the David Berg Foundation, as well as AMEXCID, the Consulate General of Mexico in New York, the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, and Aeroméxico.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present a forty-year survey of paintings and works on paper by Philadelphia-based artist Quentin Morris. This marks Morris’ first solo exhibition in New York, and will highlight works made from 1974 to the present.

Since the early 1960s, while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Morris has exclusively and deliberately employed the color black in his paintings and works on paper. Heavily worked surfaces consisting of graphite, powdered pigment, spray-paint, ink, and acrylic on canvas, linen, Mylar, or found paper, reflect a rigorous dedication to the color black and the pursuit of a pure aesthetic moment. These narrow, formal parameters serve as a guide to Morris’ investigation of both identity politics and spirituality. As a practicing Buddhist, Morris’ employment of the color black and his predominantly circular works, speak to concepts of enlightenment, transcendence, and the void.

Morris explains, “I began exploring monochromatic painting ... exclusively black using a myriad of tonalities and textures to present black's intrinsically enigmatic beauty and infinite depth, to refute all negative cultural mythologies about the color, and ultimately, to create work that innately expresses the all encompassing spirituality of life." What results is a body of work with a plethora of subtle variations, yielded from a half-century-long meditation on the color black.

Quentin Morris has exhibited at numerous public institutions including a retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia in 2004. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2006, 2000); Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, PA (2001); The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2002, 1993); Emory Museum of Art and Archeology, Atlanta, GA (1990); Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA (1991, 1990, 1988); Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Recife, Brazil (1993); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2010, 2004, 1975); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (1999); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2009, 2006, 2004). Morris’ work is represented in the permanent collections of many public institutions including a recent acquisition by the Carnegie Museum of Art.

BROADWAY 1602 HARLEM is pleased to announce the first solo show of New York Minimalist Rosemarie Castoro in our gallery. After presenting the artist in special projects and art fairs around the globe, a comprehensive survey show of Castoro’s work will be held in our new Harlem building opening the September season.

Minimalist paintings and drawings from the 1960s and post-minimal sculptures and installations from the 1970s – highlighting some of the artist’s masterworks -, will demonstrate the exceptional depth and sophistication of Rosemarie Castoro as a key figure of the Minimal movement.

In response to SculptureCenter’s honoring Isa Genzken this year, the artist conceived this show around a new body of work entitled Portraits as a greeting to New York City on this special occasion. Incorporating photographic material, and particularly photographs of herself, has been a central component of Isa Genzken’s sculptural work throughout her œuvre, reflecting on her person through the eyes of others and placing her own figure in dialogue with figures from art history. Here, with photographs made by friends, family, and fellow artists or collaborators — including Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kai Althoff, Benjamin Buchloh, Blixa Bargeld, et. al. — Genzken has made a series of collage-based works using the material elements that are by now key signatures in her artistic practice (mirrored surfaces, plastic foils, packing tape, spray paint, etc.). Genzken, who has often dedicated particular art works to specific people, naming sculptures after friends, artists, or people whom she admires, focuses in this exhibition on her own image, thematizing the idea of portraiture and self-portraiture, being at once the artist and the subject. As a sound installation within the gallery space, the artist has included her 1979 record “Tri-Star”, an audio recording of a jetplane engine as it is taking off.

The 2016 SculptureCenter Annual Benefit Gala honoring Isa Genzken takes place on Wednesday, November 2nd.
A portion of all proceeds from this exhibition will go to benefit SculptureCenter. For further information please visit sculpturecenter.org.

Castelli Gallery is pleased to present Roy Lichtenstein: Re-Figure. This exhibition focuses on Lichtenstein’s diverse treatment of the human figure in works that proceed from his iconic cartoon paintings from the ’60s. Featuring some of the artist’s most innovative works, Lichtenstein: Re-Figure aims not only to highlight the artist’s engagement with the human figure—a central theme throughout his career—but also to “re-figure,” in the sense of reassessing, the common yet reductive view of Lichtenstein as the painter of pop culture images.

Just as artists from antiquity through modernism studied the human form, Lichtenstein too engaged in a sustained investigation of this subject. Despite the ubiquity of this theme, Lichtenstein created his highly original works using a diverse spectrum of imagery drawn from art history and popular culture.

The works on view exemplify the different types of imagery Lichtenstein experimented with over the years, including the distinctive styles of art movements such as Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism as well as the design of commercial images. For instance, in Drawing for Female with Comet, 1977, Lichtenstein works in a Surrealist idiom by referencing the work of René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, and Salvador Dalí. Other works in the exhibition juxtapose abstract and figurative ways of representing the human figure. For example, in Portrait Triptych (Study), 1974, and Studies for Pseudo Abstraction I & II, 1994, Lichtenstein explores what happens when recognizable human features become fragmented or simplified to geometric shapes. He approaches this topic in a different way in Woman, 1981, and his Brushstroke Head sculptures from 1987 by treating the shape of a brushstroke as an abstract image in its own right, which he in then uses to compose the face and body of a woman. Composition with Two Figures, 1979, and Face and Feather, 1979, push the question of figuration versus abstraction to its limits, to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish the human figure within the abstract composition.

By examining the many forms Lichtenstein used to represent the human figure, the exhibition aims not only to highlight Lichtenstein’s unique approach to a central subject in art history, but also to show how these inventive works in turn offer a fresh perspective on one of the most fundamental artists of 20th century.

Images: Study of Hands, 1980; This Figure Pursued By That Figure, 1978; Face and Feather, 1979
For more information please contact Renée Brown at renee@castelligallery.com.

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present the second exhibition of this season, Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years After Infotainment, which will open on Saturday, October 29th with a public opening from 4-8PM.

The original exhibition, Infotainment, was organized by Anne Livet, in close collaboration with artists and co-founders of the gallery Nature Morte, Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, and was a legendary intellectual appraisal of an interrelated East Village gallery scene in the 1980s. Infotainment argued for a generation of artists who adhered to neither Neo-expressionist painting nor the direct repurposing of images by the Pictures Generation, but instead imbued their content with social and philosophical resonance. Inheritors of 1960s Conceptualism, these artists worked with increased stylization, transference of images, appropriation and subversion of authorship in favor of that which relates to media, television and advertising, thus furthering the dialogue of the Pictures Generation artists through strategies arguably more relevant to the social and political time of the 1980s.

Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years After Infotainment takes its name from Ronald Jones’ critical essay for ZG, indicating consideration of both the original Infotainment exhibition and its broader context. He writes, in a sentence equally applicable to our own time, “Wall Street is a weird modern morality play that came to the screen just as prison doors were closing on real corporate raiders, and the intricate bridgework invented between avarice and ethics by the “me” generation had been reworked so many times that it was beginning to look like a bunch of loose ends.”

Ever relevant today, the current exhibition examines forgotten connections in the art world of the 1980s and the art market that came soon after in New York. This moment, commonly regarded as one of the most important times in American post-war art of the last 40 years, can be linked back to shows such as Infotainment that were organized informally between artists, galleries and theorists. Collins and Milazzo, and others who regularly wrote for the curated shows reflecting the time, helped develop a language around the generation as their work was being produced.

Infotainment was never shown locally in New York, yet traveled to Texas Gallery (Houston), Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago) and Aspen Art Museum (Aspen), as well as internationally to European venues from 1985-1987. The exhibition will include 11 original works from the Infotainment show and catalogue, shown in this context for the first time in New York, such as Rectangular Cell with Conduit by Peter Halley and Un-Color Becomes Alter Ego by Haim Steinbach, as well as an expanded checklist of more than 30 artists from the original 17.

In November 1967, Elayne Varian, the Director of the Finch College Museum of Art in New York, called upon a young artist – Mel Bochner – to help organize an exhibition on Serial Art. To coincide with the show, Bochner wrote The Serial Attitude, published in Artforum’s December 1967 issue. In his essay, Bochner devised a set of operative rules to define Serial Art, specifying that it is a process that must be pre-determined, and must have a rigid system with progressive numbers or elements where order takes precedence over the execution. Eykyn Maclean explores Bochner’s perspective with works such as Jasper Johns’ 0-9 trial proof from 1960, Sol LeWitt’s 3 x 3 x 3, 1965 (on loan from the LeWitt Collection), Donald Judd’s Untitled bullnose progression from 1966, and Bochner’s own works Continuous/Dis/Continuous and Counting by Fives, both from 1971.

Artforum’s former editor, John Coplans, strongly disagreed with Bochner’s definition of Serial Art, and in 1968 curated a show at the Pasadena Art Museum entitled Serial Imagery. His essay for the exhibition catalogue essentially served as an elaborate critique to Bochner’s position. Coplans defined Serial Art within a context of thematic variation, while also underscoring the importance of repetitive elements or images within an artwork or series. For Coplans, although there is an inherent order in which artworks within series are created, it is lost immediately upon the work’s creation. Eykyn Maclean will illustrate Coplans’ perspective with works such as Andy Warhol’s Flowers paintings (early 1965) and Frank Stella’s Malcolm’s Bouquet (1965).

Eykyn Maclean will begin the investigation chronologically, introducing the serialization of time through four of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion photographs from 1887. Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow (1920/1964) and Ellsworth Kelly’s Study for a Window I (1949) treat the theme of serialization through their choice of a mass-produced subject matter. These early examples lay the foundation for the main focus of the exhibition, the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

Seriality, however, was not only being explored in America. In Europe, the Zero and Arte Povera movements (likely unwittingly) bridged both Bochner’s and Coplans’ theories. Eykyn Maclean will examine these overlapping transatlantic attitudes with works including Günther Uecker’s Bewegtes Feld from 1963 (on loan from the Glenstone Collection), François Morellet’s 2 Simple Trames 80° 100° (1972), and an untitled work by the recently rediscovered Zero artist Hal (Hannalore) Busse from 1962.

The Serial Attitude is a thought-provoking survey that affords visitors an opportunity to draw their own conclusions regarding the definition of Serial Art.

A fully illustrated catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, presenting the original essays by Mel Bochner from 1967 and John Coplans from 1968, as well as a history and analysis of Serial Art by art historian Mark Gisbourne, commissioned specifically for the exhibition.

Gladstone 64 is pleased to present SPEED POWER TIME HEART, an exhibition of new paintings by Elizabeth Peyton. This show will be Peyton’s first exhibition with Gladstone Gallery in New York.

“Dark Incandescence,” Peyton’s 2014 exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, marked the latter part of a five-year creative interval surveyed in a monograph of the same title forthcoming from Rizzoli. Together with Peyton’s first Gladstone Brussels exhibition in 2009, these two shows serve as bookends to the period chronicled in the publication. “Dark Incandescence” refers to Gustave Flaubert’s writings from Flaubert in Egypt. Kirsty Bell, whose essay is included in the book, observes that Flaubert renders the most ordinary details of bourgeois life extraordinary through his powers of perception and description, which has had a deep impact on Peyton.

Concurrently, Peyton’s exhibition, “Tristan und Isolde,” is on view at the Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera through November 26th. Bell writes: “Her work is charged with a vital sense of proximity, regardless of whether the subject is a living face, a photograph, a vase of flowers or the dramatic denouement of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. It is all about the present moment. Seen together, however, her work offers a complex meditation on the nature of time and creative potential.”

Elizabeth Peyton was born in 1965 and currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited extensively in international galleries and museums, and is in leading public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. An acclaimed mid-career retrospective, “Live Forever,” was organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 2008; the exhibition later traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. Recent solo exhibitions include: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Gallery Met, New York; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. In 2017, solo exhibitions will be held at Hara Museum, Tokyo, and Villa Medici, Rome.

ew York… Beginning 3 November, Hauser & Wirth will present ‘Memory Ware’, the first exhibition since 2001 devoted exclusively to the celebrated series of the same name by the late Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley (1954 – 2012). Over the course of his influential four-decade career, Kelley generated a remarkably diverse oeuvre in an array of mediums, conflating high and low culture, critiquing prevailing aesthetic conventions and colliding the sacred with the profane. Comprised of some 100 Memory Wares and associated works made between 2000
and 2010, the Memory Ware series occupies a prominent place in Kelley’s materially and conceptually complex output. It includes two- and three-dimensional pieces: wall works known as Memory Ware Flats and freestanding sculptures. The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth will showcase almost two dozen Memory Ware works, most on loan from museums and significant international private collections.

On view through 23 December, ‘Memory Ware’ will coincide with the release of the first ever book to document Kelley’s entire Memory Ware series. This volume, published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in association with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, features an essay by Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, London, offering a fresh analysis of the Memory Ware series and its position within Kelley’s practice.

Ralph Rugoff on Mike Kelley’s Memory Ware Series
Mike Kelley’s Memory Ware series embodies the thematic engagement with memory-related concerns that informed the second half of the artist’s career. Beginning with such projects as Educational Complex (1995), a model conflating his recollections of the design of his childhood home and every school he attended, and Categorical Imperative (1999), a sprawling installation that re-contextualized leftover production materials from 20 years of art-making, Kelley devoted himself to exploring conventions of remembering, representing, and reconstructing the past. Fuelled by a deeply felt antipathy toward nostalgia, and incorporating references to personal, folk, and collective histories, these works were formally realized in ways that evoked tropes of modernist aesthetic practice and theory, while critically reflecting on the criteria and categories through which recent art historical memory has been forged.

Kelley borrowed the phrase ‘memory ware’ from a type of folk art popular in black communities of the American South and in Victorian Britain, in which the surfaces of common household vessels – bottles, vases, lamps – are covered with such small personal items and keepsakes as keys, buttons, shells, and beads in a matrix of clay. Kelley first encountered examples of the genre at a Toronto antiques fair in 2000, where he purchased a memory ware bottle. Given his existing interest in remembrance and in re-purposing materials with prior histories, as well as his long-term engagement with the aesthetics of craft and folk art, Kelley recognized in this find the possibilities
for developing new works that deployed the memory ware aesthetic towards very different ends.

At first glance, the Memory Ware project would appear to be an anomaly in Kelley’s oeuvre. In place of the caustic wit and satirical orientation that characterized much of his output, the Memory Ware Flats in particular appear to emphasize decorative surface effects and to maintain a content-neutral demeanor. But the borrowed aesthetic Kelley deployed in the series is best understood as part of a labyrinth in which intricate paths of ideas and allusions intersect and circle back upon one another. In making the Memory Ware sculptures and paintings, Kelley elaborated on artistic strategies he had developed throughout his career: contrasting and playing with conventions to reveal their role in generating and framing different meanings, and cross-wiring readymade categories to confound our expectations. Underlying his approach was a deeply felt opposition to any idealist assertion that objects – including works of art – have inherent significance or value. Instead, Kelley’s Memory Wares reveal that, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek has observed, in different contexts ‘the same object can function successively as a disgusting reject and as a sublime, charismatic apparition; the difference, strictly structural, does not pertain to the ‘effective properties’ of the object, but only to its place in the symbolic order.’

Kelley’s Memory Ware project can also be understood as an extended chapter in the artist’s long engagement with reusing, repurposing, and re-contextualizing materials and ideas, including those associated with his own earlier production. In this respect, the Memory Ware series provides extraordinary evidence of Kelley’s efforts to destabilize or subvert the historical reception, remembrance, and memorialization of his own work. With the Memory Ware series, he invites the viewer to reflect upon the ways in which art’s meaning is always in play. As it comes to be seen within new contexts and different historical frameworks, an artist’s oeuvre will inevitably change and evolve in our minds’ eyes.

Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to present THE ARCHITECTURE OF LINE, featuring works by Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney, Donald Judd, Frederick Kiesler, Sol LeWitt, Masayuki Nagare and Leon Polk Smith. Comprised of works on paper and sculptures, this installation explores the impact of architecture on art, both in regard to the artist’s use of line and the consideration of the surrounding space.

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) - Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series, begun in 1967 and developed for the next 18 years, is considered his famous body of work. Based on the aerial landscape and perhaps the view from the window of his studio, these compositions are named after the community in Santa Monica, where he worked. A lifelong admirer of Matisse and Mondrian, Diebenkorn infused his sensibility of color, light and landscape with a keen interest in architectural structure. He stated: “I would like the colors, their shapes and positions to be arrived at in response to and dictated by the condition of the total space at the time they are considered.”

David Hockney (B. 1937) – Architectural structures and details inform many of Hockney’s compositions. When he first visited Los Angeles in 1963, for example, he took interest in the integration of the swimming pool as a day-to-day pleasure and in the two decades to follow made iconic works of this (to him) unfamiliar element to domestic life. Populated or not, his personal interpretations yielded a new diaristic vocabulary to picture making. Years later, he reflected: “LA was the first city I ever painted. I started painting the architecture. I started painting the palm trees. When I first came to LA I much preferred it to New York because I preferred the horizontal — because I’m a bit claustrophobic I think.“

Donald Judd (1928–1994) - One of the leading representatives of American Minimal Art, Judd aimed to create works that could assume a direct material and physical presence, unaffected by philosophical statements. Beginning in the early 1970s, his work increased in scale and complexity. He started making room sized installations that transformed the act of viewing into a visceral, physical experience. Meanwhile, Judd's interest in architecture and design led to a body of furniture, including chairs, beds, shelves, desks and tables. In an essay first presented as a lecture at the Yale University School of Art on September 2O, 1983, Judd wrote: ”Proportion is very important to us, both in our minds and lives and as objectified visually, since it is thought and feeling undivided, since it is unity and harmony, easy or difficult, and often peace and quiet. Proportion is specific and identifiable in art and architecture and creates our space and time.“

Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965) – The Austro-American artist Frederick Kiesler envisioned an interdisciplinary combination of theory and practice. He worked in a variety of fields, ranging from visual art to architecture, design and theatre. His vision of a biomorphic, freely flowing, continuous, human-centered living space, which he called the Endless House, is considered to be one of the most radical concepts of Modernist Architecture. Dating back to 1922, the Endless House was to synthesize painting, sculpture, architecture, and the environment in order to establish a space, which was without a sense of boundaries. Kiesler continued to develop this theme in his architectural designs and sculptures until the end of his life. Describing his idea of the house, he stated that it was to be ”endless like the human body—there is no beginning and no end.“ He further remarked: “Life is short, Art is long, Architecture endless.”

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) - In 1955, Sol Lewitt worked for the renowned architect I.M. Pei as a graphic designer. His experience in the architecture firm influenced not only his work, but also his approach to making art. His wall drawings, works on paper and sculptures relate to architecture in process. He famously stated: ”An architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He's still an artist.“ For most of his works, LeWitt employed assistants to construct the work according to his instructions. The latter were both specific and open-ended so that the resulting work of art varies according to the interpretation made by the draftsperson producing the work of art. In addition to a selection of LeWitt’s works on paper, this installation also presents the artist’s monumental Irregular Tower (vertical bricks) #1 (1997) by displaying its 1/10 scale studio model. The 19 feet sculpture was featured at the 47th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy that same year.

Masayuki Nagare (B. 1923) - Nagare explores the great cultural and aesthetic changes that have impacted the Japanese landscape in the 20th Century. His works maintain a firm connectedness to the Japanese sensibility, reflecting a modernist aesthetic that transcends cultural identity. Along these lines, he is strongly influenced by Shintoism, Zen Buddhism, and traditional Japanese martial arts. His principal stone-carving techniques include warehada (”cracked skin“ or ”broken texture“), in which the surface is left rough, with visible chisel marks, and shinogi awase (”ridges joined together"), which describes the meeting of two highly polished surfaces. Nagare's site-specific works have entailed a large variety of architectural settings. His public commissions include Cloud Fortress, installed at the World Trade Center Plaza in New York City (now destroyed), Sakimori, installed in the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hamaritsurin Garden in Seto Ohashi Commemorative Park (Kagawa Prefecture, Japan), Transcendence, installed in A.P. Giannini Plaza in San Francisco, and Bachi (two sculptures), installed at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York.

Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) – When reviewing the artist’ retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 1993, New York Times critic Holland Cotter praised the “mysterious, extra-architectural presence” of Smiths’ work. Born near Chickasha, Oklahoma, Smith grew up among American Indians of the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. When he moved to New York in 1936 to attend Columbia University, he became deeply impacted by the city’s unique scale and configurations. Influenced by Mondrian’s oeuvre, Smith’s geometric abstractions reflect his love for New York’s unique architectural landscape, its immense buildings and interspersed cavernous spaces. He advised: “Draw on both sides of the line, not just what you're enclosing. The shape you're making on the outside is as important as the one you're making on the inside.”